To Those of Us with Value
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: This is a story about wanting to belong, and to be valued. It is also a story about psychic squad drama. Implied/there if you squint Mmy/Edgar and Mmy/Nny.


Sens8 is a Netflix original series which I highly recommend, and you do not need to know anything about it in order to read this story, which is inspired by it.

Between posting this on tumblr and making the final draft, somebody asked for more of Johnny, so I obliged. It's still pretty much a story about Jimmy though, I admit.

* * *

Jimmy is not, for clarity's sake, in juvie. He's been in juvie before. It's pretty goddamn different. Jimmy (or, "Mmy" as he keeps trying to convince his cellmate to call him, without success) is in regular prison. He's got a two year sentence for assault and battery. It's a fair sentence, he tells Edgar, but he should never have been caught.

Rewind. The order of events is thus:

Jimmy turns eighteen on a frigid January evening, after stabbing his stepmother to death with one of his collectable anime knives. He knows that he has turned eighteen, because the clock on the mantle chimes 5:00, and Jimmy's father used to say that if the labor had lasted a minute longer they could have had drinks in the hospital room. He wonders if his mother was the kind of person who would have asked for a drink in the middle of giving birth. It would explain some things about him, he thinks.

Carmella dies ugly. He got her lung, at one point, and he's pretty sure the thing that finally gets her is the drowning. Her perfect cupid's bow lips bubble with blood like a demented Jacuzzi. He spends the next twenty minutes walking around the house in aimless circles, drinking a pepsi, half-expecting the bitch to stand up and brush herself off and give him hell for it. When all that happens is the blood starts to go tacky against the tile, he scoops her up off the floor and drags her out the side door into the yard. The pool is covered over for the winter. He tucks her up between the ice and the tarp and figures that's good enough for now, and proceeds to drink another pepsi.

He had halfway expected to feel remorse when he'd fantasized about it before—he was aware that people often did, and she was his father's wife after all—but to his relief and surprise he only feels the low warmth of success. He wanders across the yard, pulls open the door to his father's bedroom, unable to ignore his morbid curiosity any longer, and rifles around in Carmella's drawers. She's got this fancy little piece of furniture. A vanity? Her lipsticks are arranged deliberately against the mirror, each exactly the same distance from the next. Now, at last, his hands start to shake. He flips on the light above the mirror. She has more kinds of brushes than an art room. He wonders, does she keep—she wouldn't—

He snatches open the top drawer. He lets out a strangled noise that's half sob, half laughter. She keeps those awful little cuffs in the very top drawer, no key, no lock, no box. Maybe Jimmy's father bought them for her. His stomach turns. He is almost certain he is about to lose the pepsi he's been drinking.

He's breathing very fast. Air comes down his throat like sand, like sand through the tiny opening of an hour glass, he's knocked over most of the lipsticks now, somehow.

The man on the bed, eyes sunken, arms crossed, says, "Well this is a stupid dream."

Jimmy turns to him, fingers scrabbling along the top of the vanity because he's certain if he loses his hold he will fall down. He gasps, eyes watering.

The man on the bed frowns. "Do I look like that?" he says. He glances at his own reflection in Carmella's mirror. "No. I'm certain I don't look like that."

"Who—" Jimmy manages, but that's all.

"Rude fucking thing for your own hallucinations to ask you," the man says. "Hey," he adds, after a moment, "who'd you kill?"

Oh, he's still covered in drying blood, isn't he? Or maybe it's something people will just be able to Tell about him, when they look at him, for the rest of his life.

"Mother," Jimmy gasps. The man on the bed is so blasé, so unaffected—for Jimmy, whose entire world is a shuddering half-sick surreality, this apathetic solidity is relief as sweet as the hand of a mother.

"Huh," the man says. "Did she deserve it?"

What a funny question. Jimmy sucks in air as if he's been running a marathon, hand clutched at his throat, and almost wants to laugh. He was expecting a "why did you do it?" That's always what people want to know. They wanna judge for themselves.

"Yeah," he rasps.

The man purses his thin lips, looking over Jimmy's wrecked, blood-splattered body. He is beautiful, Jimmy thinks. He looks as if he hasn't eaten in years—his cheekbones like knives and his sharp downturned nose almost too solid for his face—his hair is disheveled, so black it seems almost blue, his skin is the pale brown of eggshell, apparently bloodless. He is the only solid thing in existence: a spike hammered through the tipsy vagueness of the universe.

"Well what's one less person," he says, almost as if he's bored. He sounds like he's lamenting a lackluster movie plot. "You'll have to try a little harder."

"Who—" Jimmy asks, again.

The man rolls his eyes. "I'm Johnny C," he says. "But seeing as you figments always do what you damn well please, I'm sure you'll call me Nny sooner or later too."

"Nny," Jimmy manages. The word is a relief in his mouth, expelling the toxic air that had been choking him. "Nny," he says again, chasing that syllable of comfort.

"I regret this already," Johnny says, visibly peeved.

Jimmy is 18, alone in a house with the corpse of his stepmother, when everything falls into perfect, mathematically precise position. None of this matters. What matters, he understands with instinctual clarity, is Johnny C.

[x]

Jimmy wakes up the next morning, his mind on the matter of graves, and looks into the mirror above his sink. A different face stares back at him.

"I'm black?" he says. This makes as much sense as anything else. "I'm a _woman_?" he says, perturbed now.

The woman in the mirror has on a kind of neutral, bewildered look. "Well one of us is," she replies, and then spits out her toothpaste. When she comes up from the sink, it's only Jimmy again.

"Uh," he says.

[x]

Jimmy sees Johnny C again, and again, and again—he sees him in the shadows of his own home, in the alleys of the neighborhood, in the sickly florescent glow of the gas station, in rooms and buildings Jimmy has never seen before. He is everywhere, a ghost haunting a life he seems to have no interest in. Blood-soaked, by the edge of a river. Armed and poised, like a hunter, in a café. Jimmy feels as if he is suspended in a perpetual act of violence, in the bullet time of an action sequence in a movie, watching one long blow carried out through the span of weeks in little flashes. It's beautiful.

Johnny flicks his blade, splattering liquid across tiles. "You again," he says.

"Nny," Jimmy breathes. He lifts a hand, wondering if he could touch…

Johnny's face screws up into impatience and disapproval. "You'll have to do better," he says, again.

[x]

He's got his shovel across his shoulders when he looks up at the sky for a moment too long, and looks down to find himself outside a club, its low walls and smoky back windows like some crouching animal. There's a woman crying against the brick, her face buried in her ragged velvet skirt. When she looks up, the sight of him stops her sobbing cold.

Jimmy hefts the shovel and spins it around. Dirt clangs off the tip when it hits the ground. The woman stares at him, and then past him. She is as still as if she were frosted with ice.

"Your garden is beautiful," she says, dumbly.

Jimmy looks around, on principal, but only sees the alley way and the strobe lights filtering dimly through the tiny windows.

"Are those poinsettas?" she asks.

Jimmy knows that a moment ago he had been standing beside Carmella's hasty grave, surrounded by the red bloom of the flowers the gardener had left behind, when Jimmy gave him the day off. Jimmy had offered to take them inside. In his mind's eye he recreates the garden he's just left, the draping willow behind him and the white vine of winter flowers, the jasmine, the impossibly verdant rye grass, soft and delicate as hair underneath his boots. It _is_ a nice garden. It's not his though, not in any sense that matters.

"Maybe," he says. "Dunno."

"You know you can't plant those outside," she says, "not in this climate. They'll die. The cold will kill them."

Jimmy looks around, half expecting to see grass instead of broken asphalt, imagines the delicate red blossoms planted in the pavement, where no water can reach their roots.

"They're native to Mexico," she murmurs. "They were never meant to come this far north."

Glass shatters somewhere inside, just loud enough to be heard through the cracked door. The woman flinches, buries her face again. Her shoulders are shuddering. Someone inside calls her name, snappish and demanding, and her whole body jolts. In that moment, she ceases to be a woman to Jimmy.

"Hey," he says, uncertainly, "you should get outta here. Take a bus. Get home."

She says nothing. The man inside shouts for her again. Jimmy swings the shovel back over his shoulders and shrugs. She'll do whatever she'll do. The world is what it is. Nothing actually matters.

He turns, and he's in the garden again.

[x]

Jimmy returns to school. If he was a problem child before he's a terror now—outside the cafeteria he frightens a cheerleader so badly that her boyfriend knocks him down, and he comes back up laughing—nothing actually matters, none of this and none of them. He tackles the boyfriend, pins him, spits in his face—he's always been a fast hand in a scrap but now he feels invincible, buoyed with the memory of Johnny C. He grins.

After Carmella, he thinks, who's next? He dusts off the kill book buried in the junk underneath his bed, and spreads it open.

[x]

He visits Johnny. He reaches out—it's as if he's reaching out with his chest, with the arms of his rib cage—and follows him to wherever he is now. The first time it was in the slums of a dark city, huge and feeling like a recently abandoned homestead. Detroit, he knows instinctively. Johnny doesn't want to see him. The visions of him are rarer and rarer now, almost like Johnny is resisting the pull to manifest in Jimmy's life. But why would he do that? They're connected, the two of them, they're companions in the absurd tilt-a-whirl of life, brothers of the mind.

He visits Johnny in the cab of an ancient car, the paint literally stripped from the hood by the passage of years. He visits Johnny in the dusty shadows of a cornfield where a grave has only just been filled in. He visits Johnny on a mountain side, where the snow is still clinging to the fingers of rock, where the world is quiet and he knows instinctively that the air should be a struggle just to breathe.

"This looks familiar," he says, peering over Johnny's shoulder at the sprawling lake far below. "You've been in this city before, right?"

Johnny says nothing, but his whole body grows tense.

"That's weird," Jimmy remarks, "you don't usually do the same place twice. You're not worried about the cops? What am I saying, of course you're not. You're the best!"

"Why do you keep bothering me?" Johnny says, through what sound like gritted teeth.

"I gotta tell you about this chick I killed," Jimmy says, plowing as usual through any hint of something he doesn't want to hear. "You shoulda heard it, I—"

"Shut up!" Johnny screams, grabbing him by the collar of his autumn jacket. Jimmy's heart stutters, his breath catches. Johnny's never touched him before. He was starting to think he couldn't. "Shut up, shut up, shut _up!"_

"Okay," Jimmy breathes.

"You'll have to do better than this!" Johnny snarls, shaking him like a rag doll. "I'm not like that, I'm—you don't know what you're talking about!"

Jimmy swallows. "Of course I do," he says, softly, "I'm just like you."

The last thing Jimmy sees of that mountain is the side of it, the rushing rock face and the cold flat pane of the sky, and then he is sitting at his desk again, clutching the arms of his chair, trying not to imagine what it would feel like to splatter across the bottom of it, all at once. He'll have to do better.

[x]

In the middle of a normal, boring day, Jimmy pauses with his back to a window. Something comes over him, into him, a moment of joy that thrums through his every cell, leaving him hollow, as if the sky were unfurling inside his chest, and then.

Agony.

He comes up for air, breaking his scream, in the nurse's office. The nurse herself is hovering near him, bewildered and trying not to look frightened, and outside the door she's forgotten to close there are pale faces devouring the scene. Jimmy pants, sobs really, and is certain that someone has torn a limb off of him. He doesn't know which one. Maybe it's a limb he didn't know he had.

"Honey," the nurse says, "can you tell me what the problem is?"

Jimmy would like to tell her that he's been eviscerated somewhere in the last five minutes, but all that comes out are whimpers. She asks him to rate his pain. He doesn't understand.

The joy of that one brief moment—perfect, crystalline—remains in the whole of his body. He can recall it as clearly as the touch of the cot now pressing into his spine. He hadn't been aware that a human could feel that kind of happiness, wonders if this is the price you have to pay for it. He lifts his hand, shakily, and for the space between one blink and the next, his hands are spindly and egg-shell brown, and bright with drips of fresh blood.

Jimmy passes out.

[x]

When Jimmy meets Edgar, it's an entirely different sort of introduction.

He's been banned from school until he can get a doctor to sort him out, and so he's been wandering in the garden, passing from time to time over Carmella's grave. It seems that she has power over him even in death, even restrained beneath the earth.

He looks up from the willow branch that he's been peeling off the tree, inch by inch, to find himself in an office. It is not an interesting office. The main color seems to be "brown": brown wooden desk, brown tartan arm chair, brown leather reclining couch, brown skinned man in a brown sports coat. Edgar Vargas introduces himself with a handshake, as if he is about to take on management of Jimmy's personal accounts. It's surreal.

"Jimmy," he says, almost warmly.

"Mmy," Jimmy corrects him, withdrawing his hand too fast to be polite.

Edgar's not-smile fades into a not-frown. He looks appraisingly up and down Jimmy, taking in the ratty black jeans and the pocked skin. "You're too young," he says.

"Fuck _you_ ," Jimmy retorts. Edgar hardly seems to hear him, turning back to his desk.

"Something is wrong with our cluster," Edgar says.

"Our—?" Jimmy says.

Edgar seems to focus on him for the first time, looking past the physical picture of a person and into the creature that lives behind the eyes. For a moment it seems as if he must know everything Jimmy has ever thought. He frowns. "No one has explained it to you?"

Jimmy stutters. No one has looked at him like that, not ever, not as far back as he can remember.

Edgar's lips twitch. He waves a hand at the chair across from his, which Jimmy begrudgingly sits down in, even though he can't feel it at all. It's like being a ghost, he thinks—there is the chair, and here is me, and I can pretend to sit in it but never quite touch it.

"Who have you met so far?"

Jimmy toys with the idea of being obtuse about it, but he wants answers too badly. "A Hispanic woman," he says, "on the bus. This person crying in an alleyway. A black woman." He pauses, runs his tongue across the ridge of his teeth. "Nny," he breathes.

Edgar's expression flickers for a moment, disapproval fading into an edge of unease, and then settles back into the pleasant neutrality of before. "And now you've met me," he says. He sits down on the old fashioned couch, the kind that you instinctively want to lounge on as soon as you see it. He sits there upright, with his back straight.

"This isn't normal," Jimmy says, with a distant sort of interest. He hadn't bothered to question it before—why, when nothing actually matters—but now face to face with the potential for answers, he thinks that it is, after all, pretty weird.

"No," Edgar agrees. "We're sensates, you and I and the others. There ought to be eight in a cluster, but so far we've only managed to contact seven. The ages are wrong, too. Sensates are supposed to be born in clusters of equal age. I know I'm at least ten years older than you."

"Sensates," Jimmy echoes.

"Imagine a psychic," Edgar says. "But a psychic that can only reach other psychics. We're a network, you see, a limited chat group. We are all, all of us, of a single organism now. What we do, you feel. What you see, we know. Well," Edgar adds, with a self-conscious little smile, "that's the theory anyways. It's rarely so neat in real life, I find."

"You said seven," Jimmy says, counting up on his fingers, "but counting me, that's only six."

Edgar's expression goes blank. Too blank. Like an unmarked canvas. "There was," he says, hesitating, "another one. Did you feel that awful emptiness, a few days ago?"

"Joy," Jimmy says, still looking at his six extended fingers. "Joy like nothing I ever felt."

Edgar grimaces. "Something happened to them, we don't know what. I'm certain they're dead now, though. There's a hole where they should be."

Jimmy considers this.

"I never got to see them," he says, feeling oddly robbed.

"I'm not certain which of us did," Edgar replies. "Tenna is difficult to contact and Johnny is impossible to talk to. Not to mention—"

"You've talked to Johnny?"

Edgar looks uneasy and blank again. "In a," he says, "manner of speaking. It was hard to get much out of him."

"He's amazing," Jimmy sighs, "isn't he?"

Edgar narrows his eyes at the younger man, but Jimmy barely notices. He's got such a surprise for Johnny, the next time he sees him. He has such things to share.

"I think you should meet Devi," Edgar says, as if he is coming to a decision. "She's taken the lead with keeping us all away from… prying eyes."

Jimmy doesn't even have time to protest. In one minute, the office is empty save the two of them, and in the blink of another second the woman from the bus is right there, dripping paint from her brush that disappears when it hits the carpet.

"Edgar," she sighs, "I'm on a deadline. What is it?"

"Jimmy has some questions," Edgar replies smoothly, indicating the younger man with one neat gesture. "About Johnny."

Devi's already exasperated expression sours. "Look, kid," she says, "Johnny might be part of our cluster, but that doesn't mean you can trust him. He's unstable." Darkly, she adds, "He doesn't know what he wants."

Jimmy feels his hackles rise. This—this _woman_ , with her pointed nails, and her eyeshadow—thought that Johnny was untrustworthy? Johnny, elegant and powerful Johnny, Johnny who was the father and brother of Jimmy's soul? His lips skinned back from his teeth.

"Well!" Edgar says, resting a hand heavily on Jimmy's shoulder, "I think that's enough for now. Good luck with your project, Devi."

Devi flicks her brush vaguely and is gone, an empty spot of carpet. Jimmy shrugs Edgar's hand from his shoulder.

"How could she say that shit?" Jimmy demands.

"She knows him best of all of us," Edgar remarks mildly. He shifts away, towards his desk where a row of little silver balls are suspended from some kind of tiny metal frame. He taps the one on the end, watching its opposite give a little shiver of movement. "You would be wise to hear her out."

"Bullshit," Jimmy says. "What does she know?"

Edgar's back is to him, but the way he plucks at the little balls of silver strikes Jimmy as pensive, maybe even worried. He's clearly on the woman's side. _He_ doesn't like Johnny either.

"What's _your_ deal with him?" Jimmy demands.

"I'm beginning to think there's something we all have in common after all," Edgar says, without turning. "And it makes me wonder about you. Tess, Devi, even Tenna—even me—we've all met him before." He finally turns his head, at that, peering over his shoulder. "It was an experience I'm not keen to relive again."

[x]

Jimmy visits the shadow of his perpetual quest again, but this time it's harder—it's as if something is holding him at bay, a barrier dragging at his chest as he pushes forward. It snaps, at last, and he finds himself standing on a rooftop in the early evening, the sky red with clouds. Below him sirens are winding down their wails, like tired children. Johnny, stark and angry against the lurid sky, has blood on his shirt. It's hard to tell with black fabric, which is why Johnny wears it, but Jimmy knows. Jimmy can smell it. _How_ is a little bit vague—now that he's talked with Edgar, he assumes that Johnny is the one smelling it, and the sensation is being exchanged between them like a gift.

Johnny doesn't look happy to see him.

"Do you know Edgar?" Jimmy says, finds that there's an accusatory note in his own voice.

"Edgar?" Johnny says. His expression opens up, softens, his whole body shifts—the sight of it fills Jimmy with so much boiling jealousy it makes him _nauseous_. "What about Edgar?"

"How do you know him?"

Johnny closes up a little bit at that, glaring. "I don't know where you fuckers come from, that's not my business. Go ask him."

"He says you tried to kill him," Jimmy presses, "he says you would have done it too, if he hadn't stalled you until the cops showed up."

"I kill a lot of people," Johnny says, forehead wrinkling deeply, taking a step back. "I don't remember most of them."

"But he's part of our—" Jimmy says. "But he's like us, he's one of us."

"You and me aren't _anything_ ," Jonny snarls, pointing the glinting tip of a knife at his chest. "You're nothing but a delusional parasite I haven't figured out how to get rid of yet. I don't want any part of you or your agenda."

"I don't," Jimmy starts. "I don't have a—"

"I'm not like this," Johnny says, gesturing to the whole of Jimmy with his unsheathed knife. "I'm not like you! You're pathetic, you're a rabid animal."

"You don't mean that," Jimmy urges, stepping closer. "You can't mean that. You're important to me, I must be important to you!"

"You think I—" Johnny gasps, a strangled noise that's half laughter. "I _loathe_ you."

Jimmy rushes forward—he doesn't know what he intends to do, just that he desperately needs to be closer—and Johnny startles like he's just been flipped on, snatching out into the air and catching Jimmy mid stride, by the throat. He looks down. Jimmy looks down too. There's a blade disappearing into his abdomen, but he feels nothing.

Johnny hisses, like a wild creature, and throws the knife away. It disappears through Jimmy's side and clatters onto the concrete a few feet back.

"You disgusting—"

Jimmy reaches out, his fingers fumbling, for Johnny's face. It's twisted in fury like Jimmy's never seen it. The hand around his neck is crushing, viselike, catching little wet choking noises in his throat as he struggles to breathe beneath it. The world goes fuzzy at the edges. Jimmy remembers, abruptly, his father's bedroom and those deliberately placed little tubes of lipstick, each one precisely the same distance from each other, and terror surges up like bile through him.

"Nny," he gasps, "Nny, please."

The sky flashes on and off like a stuttering projector, ash colored plastic blinking into existence over the red of Johnny's Chicago. This is where Jimmy left his body, at the bus stop on Pearl and Fourth, and it's gray with the threat of snow here. Jimmy's body seizes, there are hands on his throat but it feels like maybe he's the one doing it, and then the rooftop clicks into place again, with him on the ground and Johnny hunched over him, knees in pools of stagnant water, and then the bus stop again—

Someone lashes out, the two of them are too mixed up to tell who, and someone crashes into another body, howling and kicking and no longer able to see anything but the blurring red of a sky that seems to hate them as much as they hate themself, and by then it's all over but the Miranda rights.

The sound of sirens doubles, overlaid in mismatched stereo.

[x]

Edgar pours himself a cup of tea. His house is the dark comfortable brown of old carpet bags, his curtains printed with repeating patterns of plantation houses on green forests, and quiet except for his own slow breathing. He is hoping his guest will take a cup, but Jimmy only seems to be interested in one thing. The same thing he's been obsessed with since medical transferred him to police custody.

"Why won't Nny talk to me?" Jimmy demands, pacing the floor. He's apparently in holding right now, elsewhere in the city, so Edgar assumes that the pacing is all in his head.

"He hates you," Edgar answers simply. "He's told you as much."

Jimmy's hand comes up to finger the ring of bruises around his throat. For a week after he'd gotten those, they had only been able to talk when Jimmy was visiting Edgar. His real vocal cords, in his physical body, were too swollen and sore to speak. He had said, after it happened, that Johnny had tried to gut him with a knife first, but the knife hadn't been corporeal enough to do the damage.

"But," Jimmy says. He doesn't say anything else. The wrongness of the situation is too all-consuming for him to parse out what, precisely, to say.

"Here," Edgar says, "have some tea."

Jimmy hisses at him. "He likes _you_ ," Jimmy says. "You and that bitch Devi. Why are you two so different?"

"I suspect it's because we are so different," Edgar says, sipping tea from his porcelain tea cup. He didn't used to drink so much tea, but every time he sees those black marks around Jimmy's throat he gets sympathy pains. He sees the black, doubtful look Jimmy is giving him and tries to think of a more effective explanation. "You remind him," Edgar says, carefully, "of his vices. His guilt. The flimsiness of his own excuses."

"He's not guilty of anything," Jimmy says, although the fingers pressing reflexively on his throat might say otherwise. "Not in any way that matters."

"You don't control yourself," Edgar goes on, "you don't plan, you don't think about consequences. You could, if you wanted to, but you don't. If you'll pardon my saying so, Jimmy, you are a creature of almost single minded impulse. You terrify him."

"Well what about you," Jimmy snaps hoarsely, "what about you two?"

Edgar opens his left hand. "Control," he says. "Foresight. Consequence." He regards the younger man and his circled eyes, his twitching hands, his restlessness. It's been like this for a week, and it doesn't seem to be improving. Edgar shapes what he hopes is a kind smile. "Have you talked to Devi about it?"

"She won't talk to me," Jimmy snaps. "She blocked me out. I can't get through."

Edgar peers over the rim of the cup. "Devi says we can't control you," he informs the younger man, lining up the words and offering them delicately. "She believes you've put us all in danger."

"Who's in danger!" Jimmy shouts. "I'm the one who's gonna get the goddamn book thrown at him, all you merry little bastards'll be just fine living it up on the outside."

"We worry," Edgar starts. "Ah. We worry that the prison medical system might—"

"You think I'm gonna squeal on you," Jimmy snarls, "that's what you think! You think I'm gonna spill my psychic guts so I can cut myself a deal!"

Edgar says, "Please, have some tea?"

Jimmy swipes the cup from him and, for a moment, they switch places. The tea goes down Edgar's throat, but Jimmy is the one who tastes it.

"You've made it clear that the cluster isn't as important to you as it is to the rest of us," Edgar says, after a moment. He watches as Jimmy drops the tea cup, allowing it to bounce dangerously off the carpeted floor. "Devi raises a legitimate point."

"Yeah? And what do you think?"

Edgar, once again in his own chair, picks the cup off the floor and settles it onto the coffee table, on a coaster. Edgar has taken care to appear to be much more knowledgeable than he actually is, and the result is that while the seven of them look now to Devi for leadership, Devi looks to him for solidity. It is a tenuous position to be in. He must walk a fine line with all of them, never saying too much, if he is to continue to be of value. Tess, he thinks, has nearly figured him out. And yet the way Jimmy stands in his office, brittle and furious and impossibly lonely, moves him to honesty. Jimmy is so young. An unrepentant murderer, a rising criminal, and still. Very delicate, in his own way. Edgar has found that he cares very little for the world outside their cluster, or what judgment it has to render.

"I think that the cluster is more important to you than you'd like us to think," he says. "I think you've never really belonged anywhere, and you'd rather belong here behind bars than be free and alone again."

Jimmy stands stock still, and then abruptly disappears.

After that, with no real explanation, Jimmy becomes a regular visitor.

[x]

"Who is this chump?" Jimmy asks, hovering behind Edgar's 5:00. The man is the son of a rich man, rich in his own right, and he is clenching the arms of the arm chair as if he's about to peel the upholstery right off. Edgar, of course, could not answer if he wanted to.

"Derdrick," he says, soothingly. "The law is the law. You cannot simply make it otherwise by wishing."

Derdrick is mostly, Edgar suspects, the product of an environment that never told him no. There are some symptoms that they've been trying to treat, but the biggest problem is a matter of paradigm. Today is a Bad Day for Derdrick.

"They talked to you, didn't they?" Derdrick says. His eyes are wider than they ought to be given that they are 1. In a well lit room, and 2. Not currently engaged in combat. He's so tense he looks like he could snap in half. "They got to you, you mercenary bastard."

Edgar sighs. "Derdrick," he says, "as I always tell you, I have no contact with the rest of your family. There are no schemes—"

The man is up out of his chair, launched right across the space between them. His elbows hit the desk, his leg kicks up behind him. Jimmy is hovering behind him, fascinated, as he reaches across the desk and wraps his fist tightly in Edgar's tie. Edgar pats it gently.

"Derdrick," he says again, and then, "Derdrick. Please. You still haven't told me about Maui."

The man freezes, uncertain, and then loosens his grip. "They delayed our flight," he mumbles. "Twenty whole minutes, and me the best customer they've ever had."

Yes, Edgar thinks, if by best you mean "most expensive and difficult to please", you certainly are.

"How unreasonable," he says.

Derdrick lets him go, slinks off the table. He really digs into the topic of Maui. Jimmy comes to rest beside Edgar, one thigh up on the top of the desk. "You're a smooth motherfucker," he remarks. It sounds like a compliment. Edgar takes it as one.

[x]

Jimmy appears in Edgar's arm chair, in the moment between Edgar's closing the door on his last patient and returning to the room. Orange does not suit the younger man. He looks pale and drawn and garish, except for the purple bruise blossoming across his chin.

"You're in solitary again," Edgar says. He disproves. He tries not to let this show, but Jimmy knows him better now than any of his patients, and he notices.

"Yeeeaaaaah," he drawls, flicking the back of the chair. He's got his legs over the arm of it. "What else am I supposed to do? People wanna fight me, I'm gonna let 'em have it."

Edgar closes the door, properly, and makes his way across the office to where Jimmy is sprawled. He looks like hell—that's not much worse than he's always looked, though. Edgar reaches out and grips his chin gently with one hand, smoothing a thumb over the deepest part of the bruise. Jimmy freezes.

"You must not be very interested in parole," Edgar observes. Jimmy is looking at him with the closest thing to fear he's ever seen on the boy.

"Heh," Jimmy rasps. "Pipe dream."

"Are you picking fights because you're bored?" Edgar asks him, still not letting go. He turns Jimmy's head, for a better look at the other side of the welt.

"Sure," Jimmy says. He doesn't talk much about what it's like on the inside. He's not much liked, Edgar can tell, but how much of that is Jimmy's own fault remains a bit of a mystery.

"Are you picking fights," Edgar continues, "because you want to be in solitary?"

Jimmy's eyes shift. He's looking at the wall where Edgar's degrees are hung, but he's not reading them. "Who would want to be in solitary?" he retorts.

Edgar hums, bringing his other hand up to cup the place where jaw joins throat. "Maybe someone who worries about what will happen to their body while they're visiting elsewhere," he says. The gentle pressure of his hands can force Jimmy to face him, but not to look at him.

"It's boring," Jimmy says. "Prison is the most boring thing on the fuckin planet. Of course I'd rather be visiting."

"Do you pick fights," Edgar says, quietly, "because you want to see me?"

Jimmy draws back, snake-fast. "You're just as boring," he snaps.

Edgar lets him go and makes his way back to his own desk, closes the file that had been open there for his last appointment. "But none of the others will put up with you," Edgar points out to him, "not for very long. So who else are you trying to see if not me?"

"Look," Jimmy says, "I just wanna see _somebody_ , I don't care who it is at this point."

Edgar decides not to push him. He's kind of, and Edgar thinks this in a very sympathetic way, an idiot. Smart enough not to get caught for murder, dumb enough to get picked up for picking a fight in a bar he wasn't old enough to drink at. That had been the first offense, as he understands it. Jimmy doesn't think things through very deeply, and he's not keen on self-examination. "I've got a patient in five minutes," is all Edgar actually says. "Stay if you like, but don't distract me."

Jimmy kicks up a big fuss about the boredom—psych is a waste of time, how the fuck is he supposed to stay entertained, he'll kill himself if he has to listen to some overworked housewife whine about her shitty offspring—but stays, in the end.

[x]

Something terrible is happening to Tess. She's known for a long time that she's made a grave mistake with this one, but it seems impossible to crawl out of the hole she's dug herself, as if her clawing fingers do nothing but drag dirt down around her. This boyfriend is much, much worse than the others.

For most of her life she's thought disdainfully about the girls who let themselves get pushed around by their partners. At least I'm not like that, she had thought, I might be a doormat and a lousy excuse for a person but at least I would never let someone do that.

As it turns out, it's much easier to think you'll be brave when you're not looking down the barrel of a shotgun.

"Hey," she says, holding out her empty hands, "Brian, let's talk about this."

There's gas in the tank, she thinks. I'm done. I'm done for real. I've got a hundred in the bank and I can live in the car for a few days, until the paycheck comes. With some effort, I can probably manage not to look too obviously homeless at work in the meantime.

"Baby," she says, "you know I love you, you know I'd do anything for you."

Brian looks—she can barely meet his eye but of course she has to, she has to or he won't believe her. She steps closer. He takes a step back. Hope flares in her chest until his hands scramble to readjust his grip on the awful thing, until he hefts it and slots it firmer into his shoulder, and she has half a second to realize how _fucking scared_ she really is, how frantically all her organs seem to be working as if they can lift her right up off this kitchen floor if they just pump hard enough, she feels her heart give an arrhythmic thump, and then—

Devi is standing in her kitchen, but she's not standing, she's diving. She ducks under the barrel—Brian fires off a belated shot in his panic, and it goes wild right into the clock over the door—and she buries an elbow in Brian's gut. The gun clatters out of his hands. She slams her knee into his groin, pounds her fists into his face. These are Tess's hands, with longer cumbersome nails and less punching power, but Devi is the one using them. Brian sags and sobs and bleeds from a scratch along his temple, on the floor, so pathetic you wouldn't even believe he was only a moment ago in the ugly midst of an attempted murder-suicide. He does this. He goes from huge and terrible to small and vulnerable, but with Devi in the driver's seat for the first time it's not enough to make Tess back down.

Devi looks up, briefly, and sees Jimmy watching them. His expression is neutral. He is neither worried nor bothered by the scene unfolding crunch after crunch in front of him—they can feel it through the wire of their connection, both Devi and Tess. He is simply… satisfied.

Devi draws back at last, when her knuckles start to hurt. She blinks. The world seems to return to her from the edges inward, becoming real again. Tess is sobbing mouthlessly. Brian is sobbing blood and snot. Devi looks at her fists. She is, abruptly, terrified.

When Johnny tried to kill her, she had incapacitated him and run. Why now—why this—why even now did she still bubble with the desire to—

Devi disappears. She leaves Tess in her wake, knuckles bloody and raw, hiccupping great wet breaths.

"I can't," she says, "I can't—"

"Alright," Jimmy says, "then don't."

Jimmy stands up from the place where Tess had been crouched over her boyfriend. He shakes the feeling back into his hands, kicks the arm that's reaching out for his leg, and makes his way into the kitchen. He opens the fridge. "No pepsi," he says, aggrieved. He shakes his head. "Brian, my guy, you run a loose fuckin ship."

He settles for a coke zero and then rifles through the drawers until he finds the cling wrap. Tess would have known where it was, but Tess is not here right now. Jimmy is here. He'll take care of it. He rips of a long strip of the plastic wrap and returns to Brian, crouched now beside the couch. There are little spots where his drool and tears have soaked into the carpet. Jimmy kicks him over—it isn't difficult—and sits down on his stuttering chest.

"You wanna die so bad," he smiles, "alright. No problem."

When Tess wakes up the next morning she remembers none of this, and she is grateful.

[x]

"It's just like everywhere else," Jimmy says, lying on Edgar's couch. He looks distant. Disheveled.

"I'm sorry," Edgar says, setting down his book. This isn't the first time Jimmy has visited him at home, but it's rare. "What is?"

Jimmy gestures at the world around them, a tired twist of his fingers, and the green dimness of Edgar's living room has become the stark silver box of Jimmy's. His cellmate is absent. There doesn't seem to be anyone on the block.

"Are you alright?" Edgar asks. He doesn't know why he's asking. Jimmy has appeared to him scratched and bruised and everything in between, and it's always been fine. _He's_ always been fine.

"I thought…" Jimmy says, "I thought things were gonna be a certain way in here. I was ready for it. Jesus, I was wrong."

Edgar steps across the cell, stands over the cot. "Jimmy," he says, "do you want to talk?"

Jimmy grimaces. He's looking at the ceiling, his eyes dark and distant, and then he snaps his attention to Edgar. It's a bad look to be faced with. Jimmy snatches Edgar's hand and yanks him down onto the cot, rolling him so that Edgar lands underneath the slight but pressing weight of the younger man. He looks up at the shadowed face, the concrete ceiling above them.

"Stay with me," Jimmy orders. "I know you're not doing anything."

"Okay," Edgar says.

Jimmy pauses, like a confused dog, pulling back. "Okay?" he echoes.

"Okay," Edgar repeats. He spreads his palms, the universal gesture of peace.

Jimmy looks Edgar up and down, from the place where his own thighs bracket the man to the glasses that rest slightly askew on the nose. The CD in his head is visibly skipping.

"Good," he says, at last, but doesn't seem to know what comes after that. He hovers above Edgar, fingers twitching in the thin sheet on either side. There is no sound at all.

"Today the manager of an international bank chain told me that he has a daddy fetish," Edgar offers. "Naturally I can't tell you which bank chain, but suffice to say it is very well established. He wanted to know if I could cure him. I said no. Then he asked if I would be interested in role playing."

Jimmy lets out a snort of sudden laughter, sounding like he might have hurt his throat in the process. His eyes water. "No fuckin way," he says, between giggles.

Edgar tilts his head. "Scout's honor," he says. "I told him no, of course. I recommended him a website he might like, though."

"Imagine you," Jimmy laughs, "roleplaying."

"Oh," Edgar says, primly, "I'm more than capable. But I don't do that kind of work."

The brittle tension that has wracked Jimmy's lean form before seems to have evaporated entirely, taking its peculiar aura of dread along with it. The cell is less sinister now—barren and unpleasant, certainly, but less like the inside of a crematorium. They sit comfortably silent for a long time like that.

At last Jimmy drops to his elbows, shimmying down the length of Edgar. It was probably not intended to be arousing, which is good, because it isn't. Intellectually, Edgar is aware that they could not possibly be in the same room right now, could not possibly be in a state of actual physical contact. And yet, the thump of Jimmy's heart is so tactile, the slide of his skin so certain.

"I was going to offer to have sex with you," Jimmy says, "to make you stay."

"Jimmy we're not really here," Edgar explains, patiently. "This is only the illusion of simultaneity. There is no one with whom to _have_ the sex."

Jimmy snorts. "This is real enough," he says, "I could make it work."

"Either way it's not necessary," Edgar replies. "You're right. I'm not doing anything else right now."

Jimmy sucks on his lip. Edgar can hear the squeak and pop of it. "Not sure what you get out of it," he says. "Inside of a jail cell isn't much to write home about."

Edgar smiles. The expression doesn't come as naturally to him, but this is the right time for it and he means it, even though it takes a little effort to kick start. "Would you like to know a secret?" Edgar asks.

Jimmy draws back a little, wary, but says, "Alright."

"None of the others like me much either," he says. "Except Johnny, I suppose, but being liked by Johnny is its own particular kind of headache."

A wistful expression crosses Jimmy's face at the mention of Johnny, but it doesn't overtake him—having the daylights beaten out of him the last time they visited must have been enough to make Jimmy back off, a little. Edgar mentally reassessed his earlier assumptions about sex. If Johnny could nearly throttle another member of the cluster to death during a visit, maybe you could actually have sex. He still wasn't certain what the mechanism behind all it was, despite his deliberate attempts to appear confidently In the Know.

"If he scares you so much," Jimmy says, "how come you're working so hard to protect him?"

Ah, he doesn't need to clarify. Who else could they be talking about? Edgar counts cracks in the ceiling, wondering how much he should really say. He doesn't know all that much more than any of the rest of them. The rest tolerate him because he's good at seeming like he knows more than that, at making the right guesses and dropping the right hints, masking his own confusion as the reticence of the wise master. He holds back more than he has to, because when the time comes that he doesn't know the answer, they'll believe that's just the way he is.

"I've got a... skewed sense of morality," Edgar admits. "Relativistic, if you will. The law, the world, this jail-" he gestures at the room above him, "they mean very little to me. What matters to me is the cluster. Even when they don't like me, even when they don't want me. Even when they terrify me. They belong with me, I'll do anything to protect them. And you."

He places his hand on Jimmy's back, a liberty that pays off when the younger man makes no move to dislodge him. "Especially you," he adds.

"What?" Jimmy says. "What's important about me?"

There are so many answers to that, fact and lie, answers that would each result in a different future. Jimmy, aggressive suspicious terror that he is, leaves himself wide open for every kind of manipulation. He guards himself in the wrong places. Edgar could have anything he wanted with the simplest twist of a phrase, could line this angry young thing up and knock him down with the barest flick of a wrist. Edgar chooses, instead, to tell the truth.

"It's nice to be wanted," he says. "I haven't been wanted outside of a professional capacity in a long time."

At that, Jimmy seizes up, on top of him. It doesn't seem to be a bad thing, precisely—the expression on his face is closer to muted awe than terror—but the strain that passes over him looks worryingly intense. Edgar reaches up and places a hand on his shoulder. Jimmy twitches, underneath his grip. His eyes are distant again. Edgar tries to imagine what could possibly be happening inside his head. He looks as if he's dropped from the top peak of a roller coaster.

"Are you alright?" Edgar asks, carefully.

"Fine." Jimmy twitches again, and then looks down. There's something almost hungry in his expression now.

"Ah," Edgar says, uncertain now for the first time, "good."

[x]

It is winter. The boy is fourteen years old. He's sitting in the park, waiting for his father to pick him up. His father is a busy man, but he's never been so busy that he can't remember to pick up his only son. They're not close, as parents and children go, but they're amicable enough. His father is getting married next month. The boy isn't sure he likes the idea of another woman crowding up the house where his real mother once lived, but he's pretty sure he can just ignore her for the most part. After all, his father hardly takes up any space in their house. How much more room could a step-mother?

There's an older boy by the swing set. He seems like he's standing on that awkward cusp between teenagerdom and actual manhood, awkward and skinny and looking vaguely hunted. A sketchbook, foxed along the edge, peaks out of his bag.

"Hi," the boy says, sitting down in the swing next to him, "I'm Jimmy. Who're you?"

Jimmy has always been gregarious to a fault, especially since he's been consistently unpopular with classmates since the barely remembered reaches of elementary school. Clarissa Kently says he never learns. He thinks this is clearly untrue—he's pretty good at math, he's got the report cards to prove it. This kid doesn't seem much more enthused than the rest of the people Jimmy approaches, but that doesn't mean it's a lost cause yet.

"Johnny," the older boy says. He's much too tall for the swing, and much too thin for his own bones.

"Hey," Jimmy says, "we're like a talk show act. Jimmy and Johnny. It rhymes."

"It doesn't rhyme," Johnny says. "Don't be stupid."

"Alright," Jimmy agrees. He kicks himself back, the chains of the swing creaking above him. "How come you're sitting here all alone?"

Johnny shrugs, and somehow he manages to make the movement look aggressively sharp. "Maybe I like being alone," he says.

"I like being alone too," Jimmy says, "sometimes. Sometimes I really want my dad to come home but he doesn't, so I have to be alone anyways."

It's warm for December, probably the last of the truly warm days before the weather races forward into true winter. The ground is littered with browning leaves and woodchips, sand kicked out from underneath the monkey bars. The kids in this neighborhood are mostly too old or too young right now to come out to play, and so the swings belong to the twilight kingdom of adolescents. Jimmy talks. Jimmy talks about any number of things which are unimportant but seem to want for saying, because he doesn't really get a chance to talk to many people for any extended period of time. Johnny might or might not be listening, it's hard to tell. He doesn't leave though.

The sun is dropping low somewhere in the sky, behind a veil of cloud cover, turning the whole western world white. Johnny says nothing, but doesn't leave. It grows dark, Jimmy's ride finally turns up, the swings creak in the wind—Johnny watches him go down the hill to the waiting car with dark, heavy eyes. He's still watching as the car pulls away. Late into the night, in a sleepshirt and standing in front of his bedroom window, Jimmy imagines the older boy still there, drifting slowly with the changes of the wind, still watching.

He thinks that when there are people as lonely as they are, they ought rightly to stick together.

Johnny is there again the next day, and the day after that. He doesn't say much. On the third day, curiosity gets the better of Jimmy.

"I know you said you didn't want to talk about it," he says, "but I still wanna know. How come you're out here all alone? You've got to be thinking about something big."

"I didn't say that," Johnny replies.

"You _basically_ did."

Johnny is quiet for a long time, and Jimmy has to physically bite his tongue to keep from blabbering. He wants to know the answer too much to ruin his chances, but he's also got a lot of stuff he still wants to say. Johnny looks up, at the bare branches piercing the sky.

"I've got a decision to make," he says, at last. "Career stuff. You're too young to understand."

"What _ever_ ," Jimmy says.

Johnny kicks at the ground with his extremely cool and extremely worn boots. The soles look like they've been glued to the leather with superglue—everything about him seems to be barely held together, stitched or pinned or outright ripped and fraying. "I'm thinking about enlisting," he admits. He sounds like he'd like to hold the words at an arm's length from himself.

"Badass," Jimmy says.

Johnny frowns. He has that delicate, bruised look you get with too little sleep, and a paleness that almost passes for white. He doesn't spend much time in bed, and he doesn't spend much time outside, that's for sure. Jimmy looks down at the sketch book partly covered by the flap of the bag, wishes he could open it up; he's one hundred percent certain Johnny would beat the crap out of him though, if he touched it without permission.

"It doesn't seem like…" Johnny says, "…I don't know if I've got any other options."

Jimmy nods, wisely. He likes to think he understands perfectly what Johnny is telling him. He likes to think that this makes him valuable, in some way.

"Well," he says, "if you wanna talk about it, I got nothing else to do for an hour."

Memories like these, they disappear in the wash of years. A word remains, a smell, a thought. The rest is swallowed up by the intensity of what comes after, the nightmares and the screaming. The rest is condensed and packed away and buried underneath the weight of everything afterwards.

[x]

On a prison cot, in a city too far north for poinsettias to survive, Jimmy flips over on his cot and dreams of swings.

The creak travels down the line from mind to mind, a whisper on a web of sleeping thoughts, and ends its journey on the coastline.

On the hood of a car, on a hill overlooking the Atlantic ocean, Johnny polishes the oldest knife in his collection and remembers only the color of December.


End file.
